Advanced Quests

Advanced Quests are the latest addition to PSO2, offering more difficult content for smaller parties. It was a feature that was announced a while back and it was initially the cause of worry among the player-base due to the steep entry fees. So now they’ve been out for a week, how have they worked out so far? This post will be talking about how Advance Quests work (as is understood so far) and share my opinions on them.

The Mechanics

You need to be lv45+ to be able to run an Advanced Quest. Despite this the EXP penalty is still very much in effect.

Monsters will start off at lv56, which means that players will be penalized exp unless they’re lv51 or over.

Advanced Quests cost Advanced Capsules. One capsule corresponds to each area and each area drops the next area’s capsules, effectively making Advanced Quests resemble Phantasy Star Universe’s “Guardians Boost Road”.

You can get your first batch of capsules for free by simply talking to Koffie.

You have 1 hour to complete the quest.

The quests consist of 3 blocks, all of which are single-party areas.

Monsters do not respawn, however the spawns themselves are denser than normal.

Quests end with a boss, but the boss itself is randomly chosen from a selection.

Advanced Forest: Rockbears or Fang Banthers

Advanced Caves: Caterdr’ans or Vol Dragon

Advanced Desert: Tranmizers or Zeshrayda

All rare variants can also be encountered

You can invite NPCs to these quests.

You can encounter Mr.Umblla, the Naura Cake Shop and Arks Clones in these quests. Be aware that Mr.Umblla can hit very hard.

There is no chance of being abducted or encountering a warp to a parallel world.

Advance Risk is acquired upon completing an Advanced Quest. Each completion will earn you +1 risk.

Unlike Guardians Boost Road, only the leader’s risk will affect the Quest

For each +3 risk the enemy levels will raise by 1 (up to a maximum of lv60).

Higher risk will increase the encounter rate of boosted enemies

Level 15 Photon Art Discs can drop

Speculated – Based On Observation

Risk seems to affect spawn density and the density of PSE Bursts.

Rare monsters seem to be more common in Advance Quests, might just be luck.

This may not be a complete list of information about Advanced Quests. I’ll add more or edit anything people point out is wrong with the information here.

Thoughts

Yeah, they’re alright. Certainly not nearly as bad as people were worried they were going to be, with the primary worry being the cost to run them. The capsules drop at a decent rate, although it’s easier to cover the cost of the next quest entirely as your risk goes up, so at least initially you may have to buy missing capsules.

Boosted versions of rare bosses are particularly dangerous. If you have less than 1100 HP and are not geared (or specced) to defense then getting hit could easily spell an instant death.

In terms of difficulty they’re not really much harder than regular quests aside from monsters being able to hit harder, faster and are much more durable. If you’re under-geared, you will have a miserable time trying to kill things, however the quests have a decent chance of dropping red weapons. If you’re not well geared, I would suggest buying some of these from player shops assuming you can equip them (their requirements are rather high). They’re not as good as 10*s due to a negative Ability modifier on them (which will give you large variance) but they function perfectly well as starter weapons. I’m glad they elected to include weapons like this, as it puts players on much more even footing gear wise.

I would not recommend soloing these. Not because you wouldn’t be able to, necessarily, it’s just you’re better off partying with people. The spawn rates will be a fair bit higher, which means more shots at drops and arguably more importantly more capsule drops to cover the cost of subsequent runs. You’ll also be able to acquire your magic stones more easily, which means you’ll be able to get the exchange shop 10*s more quickly. I’ve stated before how I dislike how this game heavily favors groups, but there you go.

Related to this, based on speculation I said that Desert would drop Indra stones. I was basing this on the fact that Wind Stone: Vayu could be exchanged for wind-element weaponry and Fire Stone:Agni could be exchanged for fire-element weaponry. Made sense that Lightning Stone: Indra would be for lightning-element, but instead the stone required is Earth Stone Privthi. So I apologize for that. You can find a list of what’s available on the Pyroxene Shop at the Arkive here.

It also has to be said that the EXP penalty is bullshit. It was bullshit before, it’s just highlighted more directly in these quests. If you’re unaware, there is an EXP penalty that will apply to players if they are fighting monsters only 5 levels higher than them. The penalty becomes significantly more severe as the gap grows. Presumably, it’s a mechanic to help prevent people from just power-leveling their way to cap by just following players in Multi-Party Areas. The way in which it manifests in Advanced Quests is just absurd though. Why let lv45+ players enter the quest if they’re going to get significantly less EXP than they would for fighting monsters their own level? Never mind that they’ll be struggling more. Further along, a lv51 player acquiring 3 risk would actually be nerfing their EXP per kill. What kind of bonus system penalizes a player for succeeding? A stupid one. The EXP penalty needs to be removed like they did for PSU, at the very least in quests like this.

The fact they only released one new level for photon art discs is also pretty ridiculous. Talk about drip-feeding.

Overall though, I like Advanced Quests. If nothing else because it feels nice to have enemies that will always present at least some difficulty as opposed to falling over the moment they’ve spawned. It’s not so hard you’ll be tearing your hair out, but it’s tricky enough that you will at least need to pay attention.